Mickey Spillane

Mickey Spillane
Frank Morrison Spillane (March 9, 1918July 17, 2006), better known as Mickey Spillane, was an American crime novelist, whose stories often feature his signature detective character, Mike Hammer. More than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally. Spillane was also an occasional actor, once even playing Hammer himself in the 1965 film The Girl Hunters.
Early life
Frank Morrison Spillane was born March 9, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York, and primarily raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Spillane was the only child of his Irish bartender father, John Joseph Spillane, and his Scottish mother, Catherine Anne. During his late adolescence, his family returned to Brooklyn, where he graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1936. He started writing while in high school, briefly attended Fort Hays State College in Kansas and worked a variety of jobs, including summers as a lifeguard at Breezy Point, Queens, and a period as a trampoline artist for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
During World War II, Spillane enlisted in the Army Air Corps, becoming a fighter pilot and a flight instructor.
He was first stationed at the air base in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met and married first wife Mary Ann Pearce in 1945. He also met two younger writers, Earle Basinsky and Charlie Wells, who would become his protégés; each published two hardboiled-noir novels in the Spillane style in the early 1950s.
Career
Comic books
Spillane claims that he started being published as an author of slicks where he was credited under house names, then went "lower" to the pulps, then went lower still as a writer for comic books. While working as a salesman in Gimbels department store basement in 1940, he met tie salesman Joe Gill, who later found a lifetime career in scripting for Charlton Comics. Gill told Spillane to meet his brother, Ray Gill, who wrote for Funnies Inc., an outfit that packaged comic books for different publishers.
Spillane soon began writing an eight-page story every day. He concocted adventures for major 1940s comic book characters, including Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman, and Captain America. In the early 1940s, working for Funnies, Inc., he wrote two-page text stories which were syndicated to various comic book publishers, including Timely Comics. At one point, Spillane estimated he wrote fifty of these "short-short stories," which were intended to fulfill a postal regulation requiring comic books to have at least two pages of text to qualify for a second-class mailing permit.
While most comic books writers toiled anonymously, Spillane's byline appeared on most of his prose "filler" stories. 26 stories were collected in Primal Spillane: Early Stories 1941–1942 (Gryphon Books, 2003). A new, expanded edition of Primal Spillane was released by Bold Venture Press in 2018, the new volume contained an additional fifteen stories, including the previously unpublished "A Turn of the Tide".
Novels
Spillane joined the United States Army Air Corps on December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the mid-1940s he was stationed as a flight instructor in Greenwood, Mississippi, where he met and married Mary Ann Pearce in 1945. The couple wanted to buy a country house in the town of Newburgh, New York, 60 miles north of New York City, so Spillane decided to boost his bank account by writing a novel. He wrote I, the Jury in just 9 days. At the suggestion of Ray Gill, he sent it to E. P. Dutton.
With the combined total of the 1947 hardcover and the Signet paperback (December 1948), I, the Jury sold 6-1/2 million copies in the United States alone. I, the Jury introduced Spillane's most famous character, hardboiled detective Mike Hammer. Although tame by some standards, his novels featured more sex than competing titles, and the violence was more overt than the usual detective story. Covers tended to feature scantily dressed women or women who appeared as if they were about to undress. In the beginning, Mike Hammer's chief nemeses consisted of gangsters, but by the early '50s, this broadened to communists and deviants.
An early version of Spillane's Mike Hammer character, called Mike Danger, was submitted in a script for a detective-themed comic book. "Mike Hammer originally started out to be a comic book. I was gonna have a Mike Danger comic book," Spillane said in a 1984 interview. Two Mike Danger comic-book stories were published in 1954 without Spillane's knowledge, as well as one featuring Mike Lancer (1942). These were published with other material in "Byline: Mickey Spillane," edited by Max Allan Collins and Lynn F. Myers, Jr. (Crippen & Landru publishers, 2004).
The Mike Hammer series proved hugely successful during the 1950s and 1960s, but the books were excoriated by the literary establishment. Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic called Spillane "a dangerous paranoid, sadist, and masochist" and even his own editors sometimes found his novels distasteful. Spillane for his part was unmoved by critics, saying "You can sell a lot more peanuts than caviar" and "The literary world is made of second rate writers writing about other second rate writers." Attractively low prices (25 cents for a paperback copy, later raised to 50 cents) helped sales, and the 1956 informative guide Sixty Years of Best Sellers found that the six novels Spillane had written up to that point were among the top ten best selling American fiction titles of all time.
The Signet paperbacks displayed dramatic front cover illustrations. Lou Kimmel created the cover paintings for My Gun Is Quick, Vengeance Is Mine, One Lonely Night, and The Long Wait. The cover art for Kiss Me, Deadly was by James Meese.
Acting
Spillane portrayed himself as a detective in Ring of Fear (1954), and rewrote the film without credit for John Wayne's and Robert Fellows's Wayne-Fellows Productions. The film was directed by screenwriter James Edward Grant. Several Hammer novels were made into movies, including Kiss Me Deadly (1955). In The Girl Hunters (1963) filmed in England, Spillane himself appeared as Hammer, one of the few occasions in film history in which an author of a popular literary hero has portrayed his own character. Spillane was scheduled to film The Snake as a follow-up, but the film was never made.
On October 25, 1956, Spillane appeared on The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, with interest on his Mike Hammer novels. In January 1974, he appeared with Jack Cassidy in the television series Columbo starring Peter Falk in the episode "Publish or Perish". He portrayed a writer who is murdered. In 1995 and 1997, he appeared in the low budget films Mommy and its sequel, Mommy 2: Mommy's Day.
In 1969, Spillane formed a production company with Robert Fellows who had produced The Girl Hunters to produce many of his books, but Fellows died soon after and only The Delta Factor was produced.<ref>p.77 Baker, Robert Allen & Nietzel, Michael T. Private Eyes: One Hundred and One Knights : A Survey of American Detective Fiction, 1922-1984 Popular Press, 1985</ref>
During the 1980s, he appeared in Miller Lite beer commercials. In the 1990s, Spillane licensed one of his characters to Tekno Comix for use in a science-fiction adventure series, Mike Danger. In his introduction to the series, Spillane said he had conceived of the character decades earlier but never used him.
Reception
Early reaction to Spillane's work was generally hostile. Malcolm Cowley dismissed the Mike Hammer character as "a homicidal paranoiac." John G. Cawelti called Spillane's writing "atrocious," and Julian Symons called Spillane's work "nauseating." By contrast, Ayn Rand publicly praised Spillane's work at a time when critics were almost uniformly hostile. She considered him an underrated if uneven stylist and found congenial the black-and-white morality of the Hammer stories. She later publicly repudiated what she regarded as the amorality of Spillane's Tiger Mann stories.
Spillane's work was later praised by Max Allan Collins, William L. DeAndrea, and Robert L. Gale. DeAndrea argued that although Spillane's characters were stereotypes, Spillane had a "flair for fast-action writing," that his work broke new ground for American crime fiction, and that Spillane's prose "is lean and spare and authentically tough, something that writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald never achieved."
German painter Markus Lüpertz claimed that Spillane's writing influenced his own work, saying that Spillane ranks as one of the major poets of the 20th century. American comic book writer Frank Miller has mentioned Spillane as an influence for his own hardboiled style. Avant-Garde musician John Zorn composed a piece influenced by Spillane's writing titled Spillane.
Awards and accolades
In 1983, Spillane received the lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America. He also received an Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award in 1995.
In popular culture
Walt Kelly wrote two parodies of Hammer's work which satirized his spare, disjointed style, overblown first person narration, and teetering, barely controlled paranoia: "The Bloody Drip" and "The Bloody Drip Writhes Again", both starring Albert the Alligator as the detective Meat Hamburg. They were published in the following "Pogo" collections:
"The Bloody Drip" by Mucky Spleen (1953, Uncle Pogo's So-So Stories)
"Gore Blimey: The Bloody Drip Writhes Again" (1955, The Pogo Peek-a-Book)
Spillane was also parodied several times in Mad Magazine. The April, 1959 issue carried a piece called "If Mickey Spillane Wrote Nancy" (the comic strip Nancy, by Ernie Bushmiller).
The television show "MASH" had an episode devoted to Mickey Spillane and his books.
In 1987, New York avant-garde jazz musician John Zorn published "Spillane", an album composed of three "file-card pieces", as well as a work for voice, string quartet and turntables. It is named after mystery writer Mickey Spillane, whose novels featuring detective Mike Hammer provided the basis for the album's title track. Zorn wrote "Spillane" on a series of index cards, each containing an outline or instruction for the musicians that was intended to evoke scenes from one of Spillane's novels.
Personal life
In 1945, Mickey met and married Mary Ann Pearce. They had four children, Caroline, Kathy, Michael, and Ward. Their marriage ended in 1962.
In November 1965, he married his second wife, nightclub singer Sherri Malinou. The marriage ended in divorce (and a lawsuit) in 1983.
Spillane shared his waterfront house in Murrells Inlet with his third wife, Jane Rogers Johnson, and her two daughters, Jennifer and Margaret Johnson. They married in October 1983.
In the 1960s, Spillane became a friend of the novelist Ayn Rand. Despite their apparent differences, Rand admired Spillane's literary style, and Spillane became, as he described it, a "fan" of Rand's work. Later in his life, Spillane became an active Jehovah's Witness.
In 1989, Hurricane Hugo ravaged his Murrells Inlet house to such a degree it had to be almost entirely reconstructed. A television interview showed Spillane standing in the ruins of his house.
Death and legacy
Spillane died on July 17, 2006, at his home in Murrells Inlet, of pancreatic cancer. After his death, his friend and literary executor, Max Allan Collins, began editing and completing Spillane's unpublished typescripts, beginning with a non-series novel, Dead Street (2007).
In July 2011, the community of Murrells Inlet named U.S. 17 Business the "Mickey Spillane Waterfront 17 Highway". The proposal first passed the Georgetown County Council in 2006 while Spillane was still alive, but the South Carolina General Assembly rejected the plan.
Novels
Mike Hammer
1947 I, the Jury 1950 My Gun Is Quick 1950 Vengeance Is Mine 1951 One Lonely Night 1951 The Big Kill 1952 Kiss Me, Deadly 1962 The Girl Hunters 1964 The Snake 1966 The Twisted Thing 1967 The Body Lovers 1970 Survival... Zero! 1989 The Killing Man 1996 Black AlleyTiger Mann
1964 Day of the Guns 1965 Bloody Sunrise 1965 The Death Dealers 1966 The By-Pass ControlMorgan the Raider
1967 The Delta Factor 2011 The Consummata – completed by Max Allan Collins
Other novels
1951 The Long Wait 1959 Me, Hood A complete novelette printed in the July 1959 Cavalier magazine
1961 The Deep 1964 Return of the Hood 1964 The Flier 1965 Killer Mine 1965 Man Alone 1972 The Erection Set – a Dogeron Kelly novel; in the Jacqueline Susann mould
1973 The Last Cop Out 1979 The Day The Sea Rolled Back - young adult
1982 The Ship That Never Was - young adult
1984 Tomorrow I Die – collection of short stories
2001 Together We Kill: The Uncollected Stories of Mickey Spillane – collection of short stories
2003 Something's Down There – featuring semi-retired spy Mako Hooker
2007 Dead Street – completed by Max Allan Collins and featuring retired NYPD Captain Jack Stang, the name of a policeman friend of Spillane's
2015 The Legend of Caleb York – novelisation by Max Allan Collins (Based on an un-produced movie script by Mickey Spillane)
List of short stories
1989 The Killing Man – Mike Hammer short story later turned into a full-length Mike Hammer novel published in Playboy magazine December 1989, later republished in the book Byline: Mickey Spillane in 2004 (Crippen & Landru)
1996 Black Alley – Mike Hammer short story later turned into a full-length Mike Hammer novel published in Playboy magazine December 1996, later republished in the book Byline: Mickey Spillane in 2004 (Crippen & Landru)
1998 The Night I Died – Mike Hammer short story published in the anthology Private Eyes – although story was written in 1953, was not published until 1998
2003 Primal Spillane: Early Stories 1941-1942 - With an introduction by Collins and Lynn F. Myers Jr. – published by Gryphon Books.
2004 The Duke Alexander – Mike Hammer short story published in the book Byline: Mickey Spillane first published in 2004 (Crippen & Landru), although it was originally written circa 1956
2008 The Big Switch – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Max Allan Collins – published in The Strand Magazine, reprinted in paperback in The Mammoth Book of the World's Best Crime Stories, 2009
2009 I'll Die Tomorrow – (illustrated, limited edition of the short story, posthumous with Collins)
2010 A Long Time Dead – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Collins – published in The Strand Magazine 2010 Grave Matter – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Collins – published in Crimes By Moonlight, ed. Charlaine Harris
2012 Skin – Mike Hammer e-book short story; completed by Collins
2013 So Long, Chief – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Collins – published in The Strand Magazine, Issue XXXIX, Feb. - May 2013
2014 It's In The Book – Mike Hammer e-book short story; completed by Collins
2015 Fallout – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Collins – published in The Strand Magazine 2016 A Dangerous Cat – Mike Hammer short story; completed by Collins – published in The Strand Magazine, Issue XLVIII, Feb. - May 2016
2016 A Long Time Dead: A Mike Hammer Casebook – a collection of short stories by Mickey Spillane and Collins – published by Mysteriouspress.com/Open Road (collection reprints the stories The Big Switch, A Long Time Dead, Grave Matter, So Long, Chief, Fallout, A Dangerous Cat, Skin (first time in print format), and It's In The Book (first time in print format))
2018 A Turn of the Tide — although written circa 1950, it was not published until 2018 in the expanded and revised edition of Primal Spillane by Bold Venture Press.
2018 Tonight My Love – Mike Hammer short story; developed by Collins – published in The Strand Magazine, Issue LVI, Oct. 2018 - Jan. 2019 – story developed from a Mickey Spillane radio-style playlet that was part of a Mike Hammer jazz LP (Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer Story) produced in 1954 by Mickey Spillane. This is the story of how Mike Hammer met Velda.
See also
History of crime fiction
Hard boiled American crime fiction writing
List of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (1958 TV series) episodes
References
Further reading
External links
Biography of Jack Stang - The Real Mike Hammer
"'Comics Were Great!' A Colorful Conversation with Mickey Spillane", Alter Ego vol. 3, #11, November 2001. Accessed September 5, 2008. WebCitation archive.
"The Religious Affiliation of Writer of Hard-boiled Detective Novels Mickey Spillane", Crime Time August 6, 2001, via Famous Jehovah's Witnesses. WebCitation archive.
Smith, Kevin Burton. "Authors and Creators: Mickey Spillane (Frank Morrison Spillane) (1918-2006)", Thrilling Detective, n.d. WebCitation archive.
Holland, Steve. "Mickey Spillane: Hardboiled's Most Extreme Stylist or Cynical Exploiter of Machismo?", Crime Time 2.6, December 1999, via MysteryFile.com
Meroney, John. "Man of Mysteries: It'd Been Years Since Spillane Pulled a Job. Could We Find Him? Yeah. It Was Easy", The Washington Post'', August 22, 2001, p. C01. WebCitation archive.
1918 births
2006 deaths
20th-century American male actors
20th-century American novelists
21st-century American novelists
American Jehovah's Witnesses
American comics writers
American crime fiction writers
American male novelists
American people of Irish descent
Deaths from cancer in South Carolina
Deaths from pancreatic cancer
Edgar Award winners
Erasmus Hall High School alumni
Inkpot Award winners
Marvel Comics people
Novelists from New Jersey
People from Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
Shamus Award winners
United States Army Air Forces officers
United States Army Air Forces pilots of World War II
Writers from Brooklyn
Novelists from New York City
Writers from Elizabeth, New Jersey
20th-century American male writers
21st-century American male writers